Leo Sterling loved the smell of rain on hot asphalt. It was the smell of opportunity. In the 1940s, Chicago was a city of iron and blood, and Leo was the man who knew how to bleed it dry.

He didn't operate in the light. Leo worked in the shadows of the Board of Trade, using a combination of inside information and sheer, brutal aggression to corner markets. He didn't just want to win; he wanted his opponents to feel the moment their lives ended. He called it "The Great Harvest."

His masterpiece was the "Industrial Purge" of 1947. Leo had spent a year quietly shorting the three largest steel manufacturers in the Midwest, while simultaneously spreading rumors of a catastrophic failure in their primary furnaces. He played the fear of the shareholders like a violin.

As the panic peaked, Leo executed a massive, coordinated sell-off. The result was a financial landslide. Thousands of workers lost their pensions overnight. Entire neighborhoods in the South Side went dark as companies folded. Leo sat in his penthouse, watching the red lines on the ticker tape fall like blood.

He had made forty million dollars in a single afternoon.

"To the victor go the spoils," he told his reflection, sipping a glass of neat bourbon.

But the harvest had been too thorough. By destroying the steel giants, Leo had inadvertently severed the city's economic arteries. The collapse of the manufacturers triggered a chain reaction. The banks that had lent to the steel mills failed. The shops that served the workers closed. The city began to eat itself.

Six months later, Leo walked through the streets of his city. The grandeur of the Loop had been replaced by a skeletal landscape of boarded-up windows and desperate men. He saw a line of people stretching for blocks, waiting for a bowl of soup.

He returned to his office and looked at the gold bars stacked in his vault. They were beautiful, heavy, and utterly useless. He could buy any building in the city, but there was no one left to run them. He could buy any man's loyalty, but there was no one left with any dignity to sell.

He had won the game, but he had burned the board.

Leo sat in his chair and watched the rain streak the windows. He realized that wealth was only valuable when there was a world to spend it in. Now, he was the richest man in a graveyard. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the wind howling through the empty canyons of the city, a cold, hollow sound that reminded him of the void he had created.

***

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